Assignment Zero

Assignment Zero, a new collaborative reporting Web site, takes citizen journalism/blogging to a new level. This new site encourages and allows anyone who is interested to get involved with reporting various stories. Anyone who's interested can sign up and either join a group topic, where they can input facts/quotes etc. and others do the same, or a closed topic where they can apply with a site editor to do a specific interview.

I think the end goal is for the editors to at some point put all the info and interviews together and write a collaborative story. But because the site itself is EXTREMELY confusing - not user friendly at all - I'm not quite sure how they expect all these stories to come together. After all, since they can't rely on the credibility of any of their sources, won't editors have to do extensive fact-checking on every piece of information? Although the idea of taking citizen journalism to this level is intriguing, it doesn't seem practical.

Not to mention, how many people do you know who would voluntarily report stories without pay or credit for their work? It seems like a stretch to me...
Anyway, it should be interesting to see where this project goes.

Here's a New York Times article about the site from a month ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/business/media/19carr.html?ex=1177214400&en=7d56774a8858fe03&ei=5070